Optical cables having a tube which contains several cable elements are made by AT and T (AT and T Marketing Communications 2122B, August 1985). A cable element has 4 to 12 optical fibers which are held together with a color-coded yarn binder. Two or more cable elements and a tube which loosely surrounds the cable elements form a multiple-fiber tube unit, which is filled with a filling compound. A tensionproof cable jacket is applied directly over the multiple-fiber tube unit.
Such combinations of optical fibers into cable elements permit high fiber-packing densities but require special attention during splicing, so that the fibers of the different cable elements will not be mixed up. In the cables described above, an assignment of an individual optical fiber to a particular cable element at a cable end is hardly possible because during removal of the tube, the binders come open and all optical fibers get into disorder.